Article by Arianna Vietina
Translated by Sofia Barbera
A line, a cut, a shot. These are the means used by director Philip Rizk for his ambitious project to tell the long and complex history of colonialism and its consequences that keep tormenting the most fragile territories, which now lack sustenance and are left in chaos. A fate they share with America which was conquered by cowboys, and Syria nowadays.
Article by Giacomo Bona
Translated by Nadia Tordera
In a former sugar factory that has been converted into laboratories for experimenting therapies capable of stopping aging, Dr. Ruben (Signe Egholm Olsen) conducts her experiments, financially supported by Thomas (Anders Heinrichsen). The theories of the doctor, specifically a veterinarian, allow her to soon find an effective cure only for men. However, therapy for women is not so immediate and requires additional research, which is performed on human guinea pigs – including Mia (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen), Thomas’s wife – who are kidnapped by Ruben’s two male assistants, the Dog and the Pig.
Continua la lettura di “BREEDER” BY JENS DAHLArticle by Roberto Guida
Translated by Paola Macchiarella
In the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, at an altitude of about three hundred meters, there is Talcum, a small, independent village. Brian Ritchie and his family have been living for decades here, where there used to be mines. They have seen the development of economic decline, environmental decay and social violence. Local people are called hillbillies, which means yokels, rednecks, a name that has become their identity. Among them, there’s Brian himself, who lives trapped between a mythical past and a future with no perspectives. He is one of the last witnesses of an endangered world, which serves as the inspiration for this poetry.
Continua la lettura di “THE LAST HILLBILLY” BY DIANE SARA BOUZGARROU AND THOMAS JENKOEArticle by Andrea Bruno
Translated by Nadia Tordera
Divided into two separate programs of about one hour each, there are eight films that make up the competitive ITALIANA.CORTI section of the 38th Torino Film Festival. The variety of gazes is remarkable but perhaps there is a common thread that unites them and that must be sought in the attention that almost all directors turn to intimate and everyday stories, often able to rise, sometimes unexpectedly, towards the territories of epic. Above all they share a lively linguistic research which usually uses archival material, found footage, Super 8, or collage in the almost desperate experimentation of new expressive solutions.
Continua la lettura di ITALIANA.CORTIArticle by Carola Capello
Translated by Paola Macchiarella
First work of the director Eugen Jebeleanu, Camp de Maci is inspired by a real event happened in 2013 in Bucarest, when a group of homophobic demonstrators interrupted some LGBTQ+ film screenings.
Continua la lettura di “CAMP DE MACI” by EUGEN JEBELEANUArticle by Fabio Bertolotto
Translated by Nadia Tordera
The “cleaners” to which the title refers are a group of eight students from a strict Catholic school in the Philippines. They are defined in this way because they are the protagonists of four stories in which they are forced to respect obtuse educational rules that require them to be clean and correct at all costs. Cleaners also describes the pressures that young people experience from a world that is dirty and superficial.
Continua la lettura di “CLEANERS” By GLENN BARITArticle by Marco Ghironi
Translated by Francesca Cozzitorto
Regina, the only Italian film in competition at the Turin Film Festival 2020, is Alessandro Grande’s first feature film.
The director’s long experience with the short film form explains the mastery of the story-telling in a more extended time, without ever losing the viewer’s attention. A whirlwind of music, glances, silences and lies converge in a real coming-of-age story. The protagonists are the young Regina (Ginevra Francesconi) and her father Luigi (Francesco Montanari), who are committed to helping his daughter fulfill the dream of becoming a singer in every possible way. He had the same dream but he had to give up on it after his wife passed away. However, everything changes when an unforeseen event disrupts their lives.
Continua la lettura di “REGINA” BY ALESSANDRO GRANDEArticle by Francesco Dubini
Translated by Giulia Neirone
“A disorienting and extraordinary experience” that’s how Anna Marziano defines Al largo, her metamorphic and complex film, which combines philosophic research and cinematographic knowledge. The documentary wants to analyze the pain related to an illness, in a timeless context which connects the director’s personal experience and Nietzsche and Winnicott’s works.
Continua la lettura di “AL LARGO” BY ANNA MARZIANOArticle by Alessandro Pomati
Translated by Nadia Tordera
Since the 1960s in the Indian jungle the militant Maoist group of Naxalites has operated in charge of protection (even violent) of the tribal minorities of the sub-continent. Since their foundation these armed groups have played the role of “public enemy nr.1” for the country’s internal security.
However for the rebels who had surrendered, total amnesty and protection from retaliation by former militant comrades, were always guaranteed within well-protected communities. And A Rifle and a Bag, the first work of the collective “NoCut Film” formed by Cristina Haneş, Isabella Rinaldi and Arya Rothe, is about one of these realities of “refugees”.
Continua la lettura di “A RIFLE AND A BAG” BY CRISTINA HANES, ISABELLA RINALDI, ARYA ROTHEArticle by Noemi Castelvetro
Translated by Paola Macchiarella
Specialized film critics were caught rather off guard, because cinema has experienced a change when it comes to the ways it is exploited. On the other hand, new perspectives emerged in terms of film discourse and instruments to understand it. It is especially evidentin films like this one, in which the stated intent is to tell a certain audience to beat it. That being said, it is very difficult to examine Fried Barry without distorting it, but it is also unnecessary to dissect it in order to extract an additional critical consideration, which would be “too much of a good thing”.
Continua la lettura di “FRIED BARRY” By RYAN KRUGERArticle by Angelo Elia
Translated by Carmen Tucci
Eyimofe (This is my desire), first feature film by Arie and Chuko Esiri (two brothers) is, like we can guess from the title, a movie about desire. The two protagonists, Mofe and Rosa, want to leave Nigeria and go abroad: they won’t succeed and they will learn at a high price not to confuse their own desire with their own satisfaction.
Article by Andrea Bruno
Translated by Aurora Sciarrone
“It was a dark and stormy night”, as Snoopy would have wrote. That is how Botox begins, in a dark and stormy night, while on a TV screen another classic cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, performs one of his usual tumbles, out of which he will be comically deformed but still unharmed. Akram (Susan Parvar) is completely taken by the scene. She is affected by autism, and she is stuck in a world made of repetitive actions and a vaguely childish attitude, and perhaps she believes that the same laws of physics that dominate the cartoon world apply to the real one, too. It so happens that she does not hesitate to push her brother Emad (SoroushSaeidi, also being the film’s producer) off the roof, who is guilty of having made fun of her one too many times.
Continua la lettura di “BOTOX ” BY KAVEH MAZAHERIArticle by Marco Ghironi
Translated by Nadia Tordera
Born and raised in the suburbs of Naples, Maria (Teresa Saponangelo) is orphaned of her father even before coming into the world. She lost him because of a gunshot by the brigadier Guido Mandelli (Tommaso Ragno), who will see the young woman knocking on his door in search of answers, once he has served his sentence in prison. With Il buco in testa, presented out of competition at the Torino Film Festival, Antonio Capuano dedicates a new chapter to his Naples, the unaware theater of adrift lives.
Continua la lettura di “IL BUCO IN TESTA” BY ANTONIO CAPUANOArticle by Arianna Vietina
Translated by Nadia Tordera
Is one hour enough to re-discuss the complex issues of work and technology in the contemporary world? Obviously the answer is no, but Fabrizio Bellomo is capable of taking advantage of this time, even if short, to propose a huge amount of suggestions and questions, just as he normally does with his peculiar art works. It is an experimental film, in which an exorbitant number of images taken directly from real life is represented on the screen: from Facebook scrolls to Power Point presentations to municipal council recordings and television broadcasts. But Film proposes a clear way through the contradictions of progress, leaving us the questions: has technology made us less slaves than work? Does it allow us to be more masters of our tools? Or will we continue to live forever subject to objects and to the power they have to give us sustenance and dignity? What does dignity mean for a man/worker?
Continua la lettura di “FILM” By FABRIZIO BELLOMOArticle by Roberto Guida
Translated by Nadia Tordera
“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” A famous preamble, thought to be immortal even if we are immediately warned that in reality, in 2020, many still try to understand it.
However there is a light in Barbara Cupisti’s documentary work My America, feeble but alive.
Continua la lettura di “MY AMERICA” BY BARBARA CUPISTIArticle by Cristina Danini
Translated by Simona Sucato
Milan, Frankfurt, Moscow, Antwerp, a calabrian city. Places in the movie marked by red lettering, squares on the chessboard of a game with no holds barred. Playing for life Fernando Piazza (Marco Bocci), that the mother has not been able to turn away from his father’s underworld; on the other side of the table, the ‘ndrangheta. To help him, in a game more difficult than he could imagine, there is only Maia (Ksenia Rappoport), the girl he once loved, now a woman belonging to Corapi’s clan.
Continua la lettura di “CALIBRO 9” BY TONI D’ANGELOArticle by Valentina Velardi
Translated by Francesca Cozzitorto
Presented in the International section of the festival, the film is about the life of a non-monogamous and unconventional family made up of a nine-year-old boy, Derick, Tammy’s biological son, and his other three mothers who raised him: Bruna, Shiva and Ana.
Continua la lettura di “MÃES DO DERICK” (MOTHERS OF DERICK) BY DÊ KELMArticle by Carola Capello
Translated by Simona Sucato
“As a child, my parents taught me to say Inch’Allah (God willing) when I plan to do something. Here, Kufid is this: planning something unplanned. An oxymoron”. As Elia Moutamid states – Moroccan director, special mention as best new director at 2018 Nastri d’Argento –, whose first film Talien won in 2017 the Gran Premio della Giuria at Torino Film Festival.
Continua la lettura di “KUFID” BY ELIA MOUTAMIDArticle by Fabio Bertolotto
Translated by Nadia Tordera
Even before the images, there is a white light that suggests the coordinates for viewing the film. A light that invades the screen and appears as an eccentric substitute for black, on which the opening credits flow in reverse, from the top to the bottom, suggesting a backward path. This inverse motion is the spirit that moves Casa de antiguidades, the film of the Brazilian director João Paulo Miranda Maria that first looks at the past to talk about the present.
Continua la lettura di “CASA DE ANTIGUIDADES” BY JOÃO PAULO MIRANDA MARIAArticle by Luca Giardino
Translated by Valeria Collavini
“Go it alone”: that’s the title that young writer May Ryer (Bea Grant) chooses for her latest self-help handbook. Although her books don’t sell well and business is slow, May has far worse problems to deal with. A creepy, masked man breaks every night into the house where the writer lives with her husband, haunting her and pushing her to the edge. However, nobody seems to take this situation seriously – neither her condescending, insensitive husband nor the police, leaving May alone to her fate.
Continua la lettura di “LUCKY” BY NATASHA KERMANI – “REGRET” BY SANTIAGO MENGHINI
